> I don't find the HURD architecture terribly compelling. I did when I was younger, but now I'm old and cynical, I don't see the advantage to the user of splitting the kernel services into a bunch of loosely coupled components.

IIRC, the biggest advantage of the Hurd design was that you don't have to be root to use your own translators. For instance, you could implement your own filesystem as a normal user and mount it somewhere within your home directory, without having to beg the sysadmin for the necessary access.

Yes, it's solving problems we no longer have; not only are most of us our own sysadmin (running Linux on our own desktops and laptops instead of using a terminal to a central minicomputer), but also Linux has long grown several mechanisms (in my example, mostly FUSE, but we also have bind mounts, user namespaces, and so on) to do the things Hurd could in theory do with translators.